Just another reminder: you are being tracked with your email.

I already wrote an entire post about this. But just to restate. There are two ways you are being tracked with your email address:

1. Your email address! If you use the same email address in multiple places, it doesn't take much effort to track you around the web. We all get angry that cookies track where we go, but then we leave the ultimate breadcrumb for everyone to track us.
2. Since almost all email supports HTML & Javascript by default (and even most people who know this don't disable it) almost all email includes trackers that phone home and send the company things like: what time you opened the email, how long you spent with it open, how many times you opened it, if you saved it instead of deleting it, if you forwarded it to anyone, etc. Again, we get angry at Google Analytics tracking this kind of info on the web, but we ignore that email is in many cases even worse about this kind of metadata tracking.

The other night I made a Substack account so that I could follow @meno. I have some idea to start blogging there as well, but who knows if my limited time will allow me much success with that idea. (After all, I signed up to Medium several months ago, and while I do sometimes report old Hive posts there, usually I just can't find the time to reformat old posts for their blogging system.)

In addition to Meno's blog, I picked a few others to follow. Minutes later, I received several emails confirming my subscriptions. The emails all had trackers in them. Luckily I use Duckduckgo's private email service that strips these trackers out.

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Do yourself a favor and sign up for Duckduckgo's service and then use it.

Also make your life easier and install the browser extension. After you do, whenever you hover over a field on a webpage that wants an email, you will see a little DuckDuckGo icon on the right side of the field.

Click it and you are given two options, to input your DuckDuckGo email or a random email. The former is just like your regular email—for example [email protected]—but they will strip out all trackers and forward it to your real email address. The latter will give you a silly random email—for example [email protected]—that will strip out all trackers and forward it to your real email address.

I recommend you always generate a random email because this helps avoid point 1 from above, but at least use one of them to strip out the email trackers.

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The two potential negatives to this service are 1) You have to trust DuckDuckGo. I think they are trustworthy so far, but as we know with Google, a company can turn "evil" quickly. 2) If they ever shut down the service, you "lose" all your email and will have to manually go to each of these services and change the email address they have for you.

There is another potential negative, but this one is out of DuckDuckGo's control. Some companies are catching wind of this and they don't allow any (at)duck email address. While this is a potential negative right now, if it becomes more prevalent, I imagine DuckDuckGo will add new domains and evolve the service to deal with it.

Personally, I think the upside to this service beats these potential negatives, but of course it bears watching and if there is any change in the future we can always adjust what we are doing.

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David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Mastodon. 【Support @dbooster with Hive SBI】